Got my Arduino in the mail. This thing is great! Took a little to get the code uploading, but I figured it out once I plugged in an LED. I ran a few of the sample programs, worked fine. Documentation is a bit of a problem, have to go to the right web sites.

Wrote my first program from scratch. Took fifteen minutes to get it flashing my name on the LED. Arduino rocks!

The development environment is a little simple, but adequate. Uploading to the Arduino takes some timing. You really need an LED on pin 13. When you press the reset button the LED will flicker, then go off. That's the time to start uploading. If you don't hit it just right the bootloader will time out and restart the existing program on the chip. There are two LED's on the board (labeled TX and RX) that flicker during the upload (mine are green, the power LED is red). Once the upload finishes the device will pause a while, the run the new application code.

To get started you need the LED on pin 13. Just leave it there, most of the sample apps will do something with it. After flashing the LED and sending data back and forth on the seral port (USB) you might want to hook up a speaker (or piezo element) and try some of the sound generating samples. These use the Mega8's PWM device.

I'm thinking about building an electronic cricket. It chirps more the warmer it gets. I just need a temperature sensor and the piezo speaker. The software isn't too hard, just read the temp, figure out how much to chirp, then chirp. I'll get it working on the Arduino, then port it to a Tiny15 chip and just leave it running somewhere. Yeah, that will drive the family to tears. Maybe I need to make it sense ambient light also...